Hi babes, I only ever mostly lurk but I am feeling peaceful and happy tonight and wanted to pop on to wish you all well.
I'm nearly 8 months sober now and I feel about a million times better about myself than I did when drinking. Not every minute of every day, of course, there are still times when I feel sad and hopeless, but in general, I feel so much calmer and happier about my life.
AA is what is working for me (in addition to lurking around on the bus, of course!). I go to three meetings a week and the people there are very supportive. There are lots of women who suffer or have suffered from anxiety and depression and used alcohol to self-medicate - I identify with them so much.
Alcohol cravings have calmed down massively. I used not to understand how people can go for long periods of time without a drink and now I understand it much better, because when I first stopped, I thought about drinking all the time. Craved it constantly. Now I go for entire days without even giving it a thought. Yay!
I identify a lot with Smallfox's posts.
Big hugs to all the babes facing tough stuff: hope and the injustice you suffered regarding your job, ma and the biopsy, baby and the intermittent attacks you face from the black dog, alias and crazy hormones... sorry not to NC everyone!
I often think of wry and sweet and hope they're OK.
AA constantly talks about 'recovery' as a process and I still have a long way to go to sort out my life. Things that have got a lot better since I stopped drinking include: my anxiety and depression, my relationship (my DH is pretty damn great actually), and my finances, which were an absolute disaster before - I spent compulsively. Now I've been using budget software called YNAB (You Need a Budget) for a few months and it has made my spending much less crazy.
Things I still need to work on include: binge eating. sigh. Sometimes I think I've replaced an alcohol addiction with a food addiction (reasonable eating habits during the day, then mad snacking after the DC have gone to bed). I hear you about the chocolate, hands! But believe me, chocolate hangovers are a hell of a lot less painful than the other kind. And yeah, the other thing I still haven't got sorted is working systematically and productively. On my research. I'm still massively late with every writing deadline and am currently worried that I'm about to be kicked out of a collective publication because my article still isn't done yet and everyone else's is.
So perfection is elusive, but I do feel like I'm making progress. Real genuine progress. I am nicer to my kids. I don't have screaming fits where I literally bash my head against the wall. 
And I almost never get a headache any more, which is extraordinary.
All this to say, hang in there babes, if I can do this anyone can! I am now fully on board with the idea that dry is the way to go, though. I just can't do moderate drinking; god knows I tried. I guess maybe that means I should post on the 'dry' thread but I feel emotionally attached to the bus because when I first started trying to face up to my drinking problem, I was nowhere near ready to contemplate sobriety. In fact I couldn't have imagined anything more horrible at the time than giving up drinking, ha. And the bus is such a lovely non-judgemental place - it just lets everyone get on at the place where they are. Even if that place is permanently in the side car.
But if anyone is feeling inclined to stop drinking instead of cutting back, I can say that not drinking has turned out to be surprisingly damn great.
Enough rambling though. Love ya babes! xxx